


at the end of everything

by scribblscrabbl



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-04
Updated: 2012-03-04
Packaged: 2017-11-01 02:19:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/350873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblscrabbl/pseuds/scribblscrabbl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eames understands now what Arthur meant by loneliness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	at the end of everything

Arthur’s worst nightmare is to fall into Limbo and never escape, exiled on the shores of his own subconscious. Eames doesn’t think it sounds so bad, to construct a new, better reality, and he tells Arthur as much, one night, tracing Arthur’s palm lines with a finger as if he’s already preparing the blueprint. (Arthur always says he should’ve been an architect, a far more respectable line of work than thief and forger. Eames always responds that he’s far too clever to be respectable, if only to watch Arthur contain a smile.)

_Anyway, you wouldn’t know the difference, would you, love. In the end, all that matters is what you perceive._

Arthur pulls his hand away and glares, as effectively as he can with their limbs tangled and skin bare under the sheets.

_That’s not the point._

Eames leans in to kiss away the crease between Arthur’s brows but Arthur turns away and stares up at the ceiling. Eames can feel cooler air circulating between them where there used to be body heat.

_It would get lonely after a while, don’t you think?_

The words don’t sound like a spontaneously-drawn conclusion. They sound like they’ve been residing and festering in Arthur’s head for longer than would be considered healthy.

Eames reaches over to lay a palm against Arthur’s cheek and turn his head.

_Darling. When did I ever say I would let you go down there without me?_

Eames never plays hero. Eames always gets the fuck out when things go pear-shaped. But there’s something about a terrified Arthur, Arthur who has died a hundred different ways and kills men without blinking, that makes Eames want to protect and defend like there’s something more important than his own arse. 

And he can tell Arthur is terrified, sees that Arthur can’t look him in the eye and hears the superfluous depth of Arthur’s breathing, the way he never is when he’s staring down the barrel of a Glock or mistimed a kick.

 _I would save you,_ he promises, because he’s found that when it comes to Arthur, there’s little he wouldn’t do.

*

Eames is the one who finds Arthur in the warehouse, seated in his favorite chair with his palms up on his thighs and a single bullet hole in his forehead. Eames drops the coffee, black, extra hot, that he brings for Arthur when he works late. It splatters across the ground and catches the hem of Arthur’s trousers, the grey pinstriped ones that Eames picked out for Arthur to prove he has good taste. 

His knees buckle and the closest thing he can grab for support is the armrest of Arthur’s chair, and when he sways inward, there’s no body heat, only the scent of Arthur’s cologne.

He doesn’t think it’s the Moreau job; he knows it’s the Moreau job. They’d found another extractor because Cobb wanted nothing to do with inception; Cobb was _happy_. It’d been simpler than the Fischer job but the idea didn’t take. Their mark had caught on, more quickly than anyone thought possible. It had been a set-up if Eames had anything to say about it, but he said nothing because he’d wanted this job, maybe more than anyone else. They had torched the evidence and disappeared the same night, on a plane out of de Gaulle. Arthur hadn’t looked out the window until they reached cruising altitude, even though Eames knew he’d wanted to, take one more look at his beautiful city and imagine the lights on the Seine calling him back.

 _Arthur. Arthur, Arthur,_ he chants because maybe Arthur is dreaming, and maybe they’re both dreaming.

(Arthur would say, _don’t be silly, Eames, check your totem_ , because Arthur’s all about certainty. Eames, Eames has always preferred to take his chances.)

He reaches out to tug on Arthur’s tie—it’s crooked and that tops Arthur’s list of pet peeves—but his fingers halt a centimeter away and shake before he withdraws them. 

Cobb arrives a half hour later, face grim but clean-shaven, less lined than it was before the Fischer job. Eames usually avoids regret but this time he thinks he deserves to feel it.

Cobb kneels in front of Arthur and straightens his tie. Eames walks out and retches on the tips of his shoes, the ones Arthur picked out for him to suggest that he has terrible taste.

*

There was a time when they hated each other, or so Arthur claims. Eames doesn’t correct him. He nurtures the idea that whatever Arthur has felt for him, it has never been apathy. 

The first time they meet is in Mombasa, at a card table run by locals with a habit of pulling their hats down over their eyes. Eames picks out everyone’s tell except Arthur’s and still he goes all in, when it’s just him and Arthur meeting eyes across the table. He decides then that there’s something about this American, wearing a waistcoat and tie when everyone else is wearing checked shirts, that would be trouble if they ever met again.

When they do meet again, in Paris, cordially and carefully in a brasserie off the Champs-Élysées, Eames wonders if Arthur feels obligated to frown when he wears a suit. When Mal murmurs something in French that makes Arthur smile, Eames thinks there’s no going back.

*

Cobb persuades him to take a few months off, maybe the rest of his life off; he has enough to live on. Ariadne consoles him but she doesn’t tell him he’s not to blame, maybe because she knows he won’t listen and maybe because she isn’t convinced. Yusuf gives him drugs, to suppress the dreams, and he jiggles them deep in his pocket during the day. When he sets them on his bedside table at night, he tells himself, _tomorrow_.

He takes jobs because they keep him busy and because he can’t do anything else (can’t or won’t, he’s not concerned with the finer details). He sticks with Cobb because he thinks he understands now what Arthur was trying to say. _It would get lonely after a while_. It’s a yawning abyss that makes him shiver at night, makes him glad that it’s he, not Arthur, who is left behind. 

He tells Cobb he knows a guy who knows a guy who can track the fucker trying to off them and Cobb says all right, not because he particularly trusts Eames or any guy Eames knows secondhand, but because he wants to find the bastard, same as Eames. Eames doesn’t go into the specificities of what he plans to do when they find him.

*

It’s a simple extraction, planned in a two-level dream that Ariadne builds in half a day. It isn’t one of her better works, but it’s efficient. 

Eames doesn’t use his usual blonde. He hasn’t since he came up with this one, his new usual, one that he knows would turn Arthur’s head; he’s done it before. Luckily their mark also likes brunettes, slim ones with sharp eyes and a generous mouth, so Eames has no problem drawing him in. The problem is that he looks up, over the mark’s Armani-clad shoulder, and sees Arthur, wearing a tux and looking for all the world like he’s meant to be there.

And suddenly Eames is Eames again, heart bleeding on his sleeve, abyss narrowing until his chest isn’t stretched so tightly, thinly anymore. In those few seconds he forgets he has a job to do and predictably, everything goes to hell. The bar erupts into a firefight, Cobb is shouting, Ariadne is screaming, and all Eames can do is look at Arthur, who smiles like there’s a gulf between them rather than twenty meters of polished marble.

A bullet catches him in the forearm and his survival instincts kick in, bringing him to the ground. He pulls out his Beretta and unloads a few well-aimed rounds, and even then it’s not about the job; it’s about finding Arthur and _having_ Arthur, if only for the length of an ill-constructed dream. 

Eames doesn’t get to him before the kick. When he wakes up, he fumbles for his totem and sits there a while, legs unwilling to move away from the remnants of the dream, already settling and dispersing like dust.

They return separately to the hotel. There’s a knock on Eames’s door shortly after he walks in and he knows Cobb wants a word.

“You should’ve told me, Eames. You jeopardized the entire job. You should’ve fucking told me.” Cobb jabs the air with a finger. He looks pissed off but mostly, he looks tired.

“I didn’t know, all right? I didn’t think—”

“In this business, if you don’t think, you don’t win. You of all people should know that.”

“And you of all people should know it’s not that easy.”

Cobb sits down on the edge of the bed and Eames loosens his tie, the one Arthur calls hideous with his bizarre brand of affectionate condescension.

“I know,” Cobb concedes. Eames hears the effort that Cobb still invests into reconciling himself to his memories, and he’s afraid, that in a few years’ time he will sound like this, and the difference will be that Cobb will have his children and he will have nothing.

He sits next to Cobb and for a while, they wonder if they’re, in fact, in the business of losing.

*

Paris looks exactly as they left it. Arthur’s wearing his favorite three-piece suit, the solid charcoal grey, with a crimson tie. He’s holding the pocket watch he inherited from his grandfather and Eames remembers the weight of it.

“You’re late.”

“Fashionably late,” Eames corrects. “It’s all the rage, you know.”

There’s no give in Arthur’s mouth. He turns to face the river and something in Eames shakes at the sight of Arthur’s profile, reassuringly intimate and still infinitely distant.

“I’ve missed you.” Eames used to avoid places, situations, people, that could tie him down. Now he thinks that this place, this situation, and this person could so easily do just that. (Thing is, it wouldn’t matter if he was willing or not.)

Arthur turns back and smiles apologetically, as if he wishes he could do something about it. “Do you regret any of it? And don’t lie to me, Mr. Eames, you know I can always tell when you lie.”

“No.” His throat is so tight it’s barely a sound. He steps closer even though he thinks he’ll fall apart, ashes to the wind. “No, no regrets, darling, never with you.”

He wants to draw Arthur close with one hand across his spine and feel Arthur’s mouth warm under his, taste the sweetness he hasn’t forgotten. Arthur shakes his head because he knows what Eames wants, and then looks away as if he only has enough sense to reject Eames once.

“I let you win in Mombasa, you know.” Arthur’s smiling beautifully at the cityscape, cheeks flushed and throat long and pale above his collar. “Non, rien de rien, non, je ne regrette rien.”

Arthur played the song for him once, when it was just the two of them at the warehouse, teaching him the lines patiently when he had asked and calling his French _passable_ , when what Arthur really meant was that this song could be for them.


End file.
